Question Sleep
by Yuzuriha
Summary: Subaru lived in the happy little world where no one was.
1. Bomb

**Question Sleep?**  
_part one: bomb_

  
  


The happy little world where no one was.

Sleep was the sound of the ticking time bomb that had exploded and destroyed mankind.

He didn't really have any set direction to where he was going. He was just.. going. The booming sound of the distant explosions in the east was fading away like the tick of the clock -- **bomb** -- above his head in this dark, ominous room.

He didn't know where he was any longer. All the time, he questioned the surroundings. Was he here or there? There was nothing left to make him stay in one place at one time; there was only the nothing. There were no roads to travel; they'd all disappeared after the end of the world.

And.. still...

_nothing._

Most of all, he questioned sleep.

Sleep was death and sleep was life again. That's why he both despised and cherished sleep, why he questioned it's motivations to come to him; so sweet, so innocent, so trustworthy, so vile and vain in it's desire to give him less pain he deserved and craved. He wanted to destroy sleep, with it's wonderful and lavish attentions and visions of a life that had long since ended. There was no one left in the fucking world anyway.

He much preferred the Nothing.

In sleep, there was being. While he was awake, he dreamt of nothing and nothing was the reason he could survive any longer; in sleep there was being alone and knowing he was alone created fear but when he was awake he knew emptiness and lay, ever quietly existing, in the world where no one else was.

Subaru didn't know how the world had ended.

In fact, he'd been in this very apartment when it had happened. There were millions of voices screaming in terror, and he had not moved. The sunlight was streaming in, the bare wood floor humming with the powers of the two Chosen Ones -- the Kamuis -- as they probably battled some miles or inches or whatever ways away. Time started slowing down. It just kept repeating.

That would never be enough to fill him up.

Then the world had ended. All the voices had abated, gone, destroyed, disappeared. There was silence, and Subaru smiled. So peaceful.. he lay for days, and one -- if there were someone -- would have thought that that peace was brought upon him because his soul had gone Within. Indeed, he had not.

Subaru simply saw. And watched. He would step away from the ceiling and turn on the tv and smile when he saw nothing there with static. Some days he would even leave his room and run about the apartment building, decrepit and wracked with filth in it's human days, now made beautiful by the absence.. and he would turn on all the electronic devices that had at one time belonged to someone who would use them to cook, to watch, to entertain, to mimic, to record their meaningless existence. His features were beautiful with a smile as he sat back on his heels in the middle of the floor, watching the chorus of metallic sounds and voices make sweet silence into a corpse.

A hundred camera recorders saw Subaru smile up at their glass eyes.

Glass eyes..

He was never lonely. He had always been alone since before that brief Time, and now that he was alone again, he was content. Content to watch the new world transform before him, to blossom, to bear witness to it's eternally new charm; to cherish the world he had loved with all his heart when he had existed with it, which had died and gone away.

Subaru stopped.

Just like everyone else.

Who was everyone?

Sei--

No.

And Subaru questioned sleep. He questioned it because in dreams, the person he loved still existed. Love still existed. And there was none of that here.

He scrambled towards the choir of electronic voices. Fakes! FAKES! He screamed, wishing they would die suddenly, withering outside into a thousand dead corpses—they-- the ones he could smell for weeks after the world had ended..

Never, ever go outside.

Never, ever, again.

When he got lonely, Subaru could turn on the radio and make believe..

..make believe there was someone else listening to all that static.

The light shone into his window again, and he lay down, his collection of humanity's devices silent. It would be a long time before he turned them on again, but whenever he got lonely..

He slept.


	2. Destruct

**Question Sleep?**  
_part two: destruct_

  
  


He slept on for many weeks in relative peace, when he chose to have peace. There were days when he ached so badly but had a little while ago forgotten why. 

He'd welcomed Nothing, and it had taken him like a comfortable blanket from a world he used to know.

Subaru remembered that maybe there had once been other things like him. Things that could talk, things that could move and look. Sometimes he wretched inside to think that he couldn't remember what another human voice sounded like, or even the warm, pliant fingers of someone who could have been his attachment. A lover -- a sanctuary, a should have been that would never again BE..

Water rolled down his face and obscured the violence of the unforgiving sun as Subaru tried to remember.

Some days ago he'd found in the piles of things -- his empire of beautiful, silent companions -- a CD of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. Unscratched in it's battered plastic case, he'd stared at it quizzically for a long time before slipping it into his coat, for the first time in weeks having found and remembered.. music.

There were thousands of broken CDs and cassettes. He had seen them while wandering one day about in the main hall where thousands of voices used to be heard. Sometimes, after finding more CDs to listen to, he would go down there and starting singing and imagine what it would sound like to hear so many voices again, filling the hall, rioting off the cobwebbing, sunlit pillars in joyous abandon. He cherished it all, Subaru, spinning in the emptiness and falling down in the middle of the marble floor that stretched for miles to him, laughing and becoming truly happy and full of it to spilling over, reveling in the sunlight until it retired for the night..

Sitting down in the middle of the trash, licking thoughtfully and carefully around his mouth on a sweet tangerine he'd found in the cupboard, trying to ignore the sounds of singing birds outside as he set about to righting a small, dented stereo. As he switched it on, a slight glimmer of satisfaction came over him when he heard the familiar static speak to him from every corner of the outside world. This was all he needed to know about what went on outside; from the window he knew when it was night, when it rained, when it was piercingly bright and the sun was shining as it had since he was born.

He wondered idly again about what Tchaikovsky was for a moment, and slipped the precious CD in, stomach fluttering slightly, eyes widening, savoring the sugar on his tongue more acutely than life itself. 

Subaru listened to the low, foreboding strings and immediately fell in love again. Over the last weeks he would lay upon his favorite bedroom's floor, which, while invaded and.. grown over, somewhat, with electronics and now creeping vines.. was bare and sparse and had a wooden floor that was warm in Winter and cooling to his bare skin in Summer. He listened, and remembered. He listened, and forgot.

He'd forgotten what day it was, too, but it was.. 

..that particular time.

Spring. He'd first smelled it while listening to Tchaikovsky again, in the mid afternoon when Subaru usually dozed. The air was hazy and his eyes would not open more than was necessary to dream while awake. He liked to remember dreams. Silky clouds above his head in the window seemed wider and more gentle, and Subaru smiled at them, closing his eyes several times and nestling into the creaminess of his long coat, spreading his arms and legs out as far as he could take them, trapping the heat inside that cocoon so that he felt a human embrace for the first time in centuries.

Spring bloomed and furnished the new world with beauty uninterrupted for the first time by anything that spoke. Light came into the world again, and he observed it through his now open window, letting the whistle and caress of breezes from the ocean allow him to breathe freely and deeply.

When the first cherry tree petal fell into his room, Subaru picked it up where it had fallen beside him.

And screamed.


	3. Violets

**Question Sleep?**  
_part three: violets_

  
  


In the overrun green city, there was rain in Spring like no other time.

He was quite sure that several months had passed since he'd wiped out all of humanity. A week after he was standing on a hill of bodies, impervious to the smell of the decaying mass corpse. A day after he was watching the sunrise, barely aware of himself through screaming, trying to make the sound carry long enough so he wouldn't be subjected to it's mocking echo. And a minute after, a great boom had taken the sky and he could not hear. He'd been holding Kamui in his arms at that time, watching violet eyes close and dull with death, so quietly acquiescent in their passing. His suffering was gone.

His heartbreaking smiles, too.

Along with his many broken promises. 

For all Kamui's vexatious beauty.. the intense life in his violet mirrors slowly just faded away.

The rain had come down in torrents, wetting Kamui's pale skin. Still glowing, still supple and soft to the touch.. he didn't want this rain to ruin it so instantly, and he clutched his counterpart close, close to him and didn't feel him shudder or shy away from his touch for the first time in many years.

_Everyone is all gone, Gemini.. the only person here is me. I did that for you so you wouldn't have to worry about everyone else for a change.._

"Though it's not like you appreciate anything I do." He says smiling, fingering the darkest locks of Kamui's chocolate colored hair, likening it to wet little bodies and smiling little boys playing in the corners of a long forgotten shrine.

Then he threw Kamui into the water, watching beauty sink into a graceful pile of rapturous silence, washed away because it was so fragile against the wave of change.

  


  


During those weeks he had wandered from apartment to apartment, in search of something he has lost from a very long time ago. When he wanted to know the time, there was a clock shop undone with springs and gears spreading into the street, black and twisted open as if it's insides were once living and the heartbeat could still be heard faintly – from clocks still breathing inside. He inspected one of these ruined things with a certain dispassion in passing, wondering if, indeed, time did not stop that day for a reason.

He was without a solid reflection to give the shadow form.

Thus he came to the present, walking through miles of the gray new world he had created with his own hands. Tokyo was a great, beautiful junkyard now, as he saw when he looked out into the world below from the high rise apartment of a person he had not known in life. Without this person there he studied what their life had been like, and the lives of many others; some were doctors, some had children and high paying executive jobs. Some were simple people who lived in rented houses in the suburbs, who in another life altogether could have been his own. He had read their books and listened to their music well into the silence, sitting in a child's room and petting a beloved stuffed animal or two, silently taking in the responsibility for the loss of it's owner.

It was raining and he dragged on past the shrine where his former self had once lived. He, his sister, and Kamui had spent evenings curled up in one futon together, being read stories by his mother. He remembered the warmth as if it were yesterday, though in his heart he knew the image wasn't perfect.

A fondness for a race that had vanished altogether was of no consequence, he supposed.

Now he felt tired and worn out, and somehow that antiquity of the moments he remembered made it seem even more far away, as if he were a man of seventy.

As for his beloved Twin Star…

No, Kamui would always be fifteen. He couldn't imagine those violet eyes getting older, being anything less than childishly beautiful as they had been that day, and all the days before that; couldn't imagine Kamui growing up and not be entranced by storybooks and soap bubbles, driving a car and having a job. Couldn't imagine him getting taller and learning not to cry, and finally seeing the common sense in carrying an umbrella in the rain.

He'd always imagine him without those things.

There were no more violets in the world..

Because he'd killed them all.

  


  


  


It was morning again and he was wandering from house to house, from one more empty palace to the next. Hearing the creak of the steps in that always silent space, he placed his fingerprint on the wall where dust was, knowing that human flesh was part of it and wondering why there was so much here.

It was bright and the blue mirror of the world flew down upon him, sole in the world to see it. A breeze floating invitingly through all the open windows and he allowed himself to stretch his arms wide, walking down the hallway with his eyes closed and his empty heart open for all the cracks in this building to see, have that wind wash through him like holy metal through his chest.

There he stopped at a sound.

Sound?

….the sound of a violin.

There was a void and a substance behind that sound, as if it had played for a long time and no one had been there to shut it off. As if when all the world had died as it had long ago, and the sweet and commanding pleading of the strings had forced it to play on. No matter how desperate and sad it sounded, despairing long into the months and still crying through the speaker of a small stereo that ran and ran and ran..

..until there was nothing left, and it didn't know how to stop moving.

And so it continued, in an everlasting loop that lived on despairingly and beautiful forever.

These sounds stopped the breeze and reversed the tide, and he was standing above it, above the stereo that had kept playing when all the world had gone dark. He was standing

Above..

Him.

No breath.

White fingers and black eyelashes cradled in sunlight. The flesh was lustrous in the blue glare of the glorious day, and he saw blue mirror the sky, living, breathing, behind it's translucent finish. A mess of white cloth on a floor covered in dust, immortal and small and precious and humbling. Long limbs stretched out into the curves of the floor, and he remembered how young he was. Small mouth, open pale colored lips curved in graceful innocence.

Immortal beloved, it was called.

"Subaru."

He spoke, voice cracking and crumbling into a whisper.

Subaru still dreamed.

One dreamer left in the purposeless, void world who's only inhabitant was Death. Kamui and his warm violets laughed inside him, and Fuuma crouched down, touching the charming coat with his palm, touching warm Subaru with his fingers, down the curved cheek, over those lips and the shock of his senses when breath escaped.

Green eyes shimmered open slowly as the CD looped again, heavy with sleep. Heavy with dreaming things he could never dream.

"You were.."

_You are, and everything I know is now real._

He seized those small shoulders in anguish, crying out in horror and hearing a voice – that soft voice – cry out with him. He hated that bell-like sound, hated Subaru for making him so relieved and happy again. Hated him for reminding him of sleep, hated him for letting him touch white skin, hating beautiful Subaru for making him stay here on an empty earth where he could think and, thinking madness, rot away.

Hated him for all that he was and all that he could have been.

"…Monou."

Eyes the color of impossible flora stared at him for a long time, awake and still asleep because they looked wrong somehow, and drops of water spilled onto his fist around Subaru's fragile human wrists.

Subaru was broken but broken possessions all loved the same thing.

"Monou-san.. there you are."

Those long, translucent fingers curled let go suddenly, as if by holding the wrists capture he'd caused the life in them to give out. Spread out now over his sunlit warmed jeans, crushed by Subaru's hands, were a hundred tiny violets.

A smile to stab him and make him whole. Kamui was fifteen and laughed again in his ear.

"They are only for you, now."

Only for him.

They waited a long time as the violets wilted in the sun.

  


  


  



	4. Death

**Question Sleep?**  
_part four: death_

  
  


He stood on the edge of the morass, staring down, down into the city buried beneath the confines of the androgynous sea. It was a pair of eyes, laughing at him as if it had always been there, like the oceans of his childhood. However, before him was a vast watery graveyard, a vat thick with spoiled humanity --- Death contained in a single, beautiful horizon, limitless and seemingly empty of emotion.

Empty of everything that could have mattered.

He stood on a gutted apartment building, it's contents living and exanimate emptied with the Apocalypse and the infinite waters below it, long past in history it seemed and nearly forgotten in memory. For so long had he dreamed, he had dreamed of becoming a butterfly and living in a blur of yellows, passion, and sun-filled breeze, that his feet were no longer and Subaru flew; all the while, standing perfect and serenely still.

When he was merely waiting for the sun to come up in Shinjuku, and the sea of people breathed; the leaves began to fall and obscured the faces under the water, a society that smiled and glinted with all the ferocity of the living soul out at him through the liquid glass, and said in a deep, rich voice.. a voice that spoke without static through his radio, a voice that was hot like blood and dragged him under the current, helpless..

It said, "Hello.."

The butterfly wings behind him were melting into snow, and Subaru cried out as it began to rain, choking on the violin singing the Air for strings in G for him and me, remembering flight then,

Always then, when "hello" meant bruises and I loved.. he loved…

"Hello, my Subaru-kun."

  


  


He was still screaming into the roar of the sea against the legions of droplets from above, curled up into a tight ball --- a beautiful mess of pale, curving limbs and chin length hair curling into the water, he was white and cold and reaching out and Fuuma simply stared at him, and dropped the box of china to the ground to be soaked.

He grabbed those small hands, finding them empty of violets or words and watching as they instantly went limp at his touch; Subaru's fingertips were pointed and the fingers long, he would have thought that since humanity was extinct, those were the type of fingers he would put in a museum, so unknowing of less than perfection. Subaru screamed one last time, the sound heartbreaking and taking all of him; his back arched towards the crying sky, and Fuuma cried out with him, flattening the onmyouji to the stone and salt and the Earth's tears in an effort to just _make him stop…_

Subaru looked very young then, all smooth, pale skin and satiated eyelashes dimming, becoming heavy with moisture in the dark. He made a cracked, killed sound up towards the younger man, and all manner of beautiful creatures described to Fuuma in fairy tales melted into empty shells of what they had once been; skeletons, eye sockets black and guileless with unrestrained pity.

In some tragic parody of **that** day..

And he lay down upon that still body with an aching sickness, unable to keep his eyes open for more than a moment, while Subaru's mouth drank in the rain and mumbled non-sensical words that no one who knew him was left to understand. He could not understand them – but what he caught, like edible slices of this Eden that had been created, sweet and melodious to the ear, thick and voluptuous in thought, were descriptions of the world Subaru had left, long, long ago.

"Subaru… stop crying, damnit.."

  


  


_"Monou-san? Sing for me?"_

  


  


It was warm again and the sky was melting in the Spring, weighing down the heavy blossoms and the clover-filled vision of Subaru's will to open his eyes, feeling heavy with the weight of Spring as well. He had continued to sleep and lay his head on the tatami and wood floor when it rained, letting the water drum him silkily into the dark. They lived somewhere else now, a hidden place deep in the corpse of the city that reminded him of home – traditional and full of dust, shadows and illusions and beauty.

When he'd awakened today the air was restless and flew down through the house; Fuuma had opened the paper door near Subaru's quiet rest when the rain chased in the morning, letting way for the gentle flow of the breeze and sun and rain drenched blossoms to follow them into the corridor. Hazy clover eyes followed the spine of a lath in the floor towards one such fragrance wet fallen bloom, softly contemplating it without fear or memory.

"Pretty.." Subaru mumbled, reaching out to touch it – soft showery silk, like female dolls in a box of clear glass and kimono, submerged in the miniature sea; all these in one note of his reflection.

All these, children's beautiful toys that cannot be touched

in the note of that desperate, tender violin.

…the sun runs in and lights it all up.

But the music had stopped for Subaru when they'd left his apartment, when the cherry blossom had fallen into his dream and the ocean had swept him up unsoiled, sterile, between gray concrete and emptiness. They found shells out near the edge of it at the bottom of his apartment building, a beach of white sand where children screamed and he listened to the new music on the wind, the creak of the swing set in the distance, rust, and the sound of small feet under this beach – dead and underfoot -- running parallel like a glass pane to his own until well out of sight. They found shells of what they had once been in this house, the dark young man with the amber eyes wiping the table clean and setting out the china for six.

"What for?" he asked.

"Don't know.." the younger mumbled, almost inward and inaudibly. "I've forgotten why."

At these words Subaru felt the familiar Nothing stretch out beneath them, like the vast graveyard despoiling the shore of what could have been eden; in their minds, in their eyes.. and everything in the this place felt quiet when he touched it, and everything in Fuuma's eyes felt empty when he looked at them and they weren't looking back.

That would never be enough to fill them up.

There were no mirrors after the end of the world for a long time. And even now, in the reflection of those eyes green as the plain behind their city and as the glass littering and sparkling in the street, Fuuma's manifestation in them paled and crumbled before him. He could look into them sometimes for hours, holding the cream ivory skin in his hands, the frail figure in his lap, as Subaru looked infinitely up with the patience and the sorrow of what a human mirror must be, watching his image wilt like a rose.

And when the sun went down and he leaned in close to catch the shards of sparkle glisten in them, looking hard,

Subaru would smile.

And he would sing.

_"Hush little baby don't you cry…"_

  


  


  


The rain fell again, and when Death would smile, Fuuma Monou shivered and comforted him, watching his reflection die in the shadows of those eyes.. and the sun flickers out, leaving them again to noise.


	5. Wake

**Question Sleep?**  
_part five: wake_

  
  


The beginning of the play was a broken shard of glass. It danced on the horizon in front of him, glittering and toothy like the enigma of a blurred afternoon -- all afternoons -- and Fuuma watched it glide over skin and thread, fascinated by the way they curled around his arm, Subaru's fingers cold and tied to each one, a single string.

Music filtered down to them from their pile of electronic devices long since become beaten, sharp edges rounded and softened by the stains of time that reached in and grabbed out the memory of dance and crowds. There were no crowds and no true dancing. Not anymore.

There is only you and I... we can't fill any space, and you've forgotten how to dance..

It was still raining, and he grasped the threads of the spiderweb beside his arm, which for some reason shined red, in the right light.

"What are you playing?"

"Chopin."

They looked together at Subaru's work; horrible wirings and knots of string, pieces of multi-colored glass and mirror and lamps captured together on this web, this charming trap he'd devised and called beautiful.

"I can see light through the glass." He comments, looking upside down to see the sparkle in the jagged edges, brighter and dangerous to the eye and touch.

"Me too."

It was alien and had no meaning, only understood in the air and sunlight. He built it there, while Fuuma rested on the far shore, letting the water creep over him as the ocean darkened closer, crumbled and disapperated into a fluid, tender corpse.

Subaru lead him on with those unassuming eyes, the promise of silence deafening him to the waves for a moment; he heard now the ringing in his ears he was familiar with, lying in bed one night without breath, crushed by the negligible weight of his warm, violet-eyed lover. He couldn't breathe in that world, a fish lying on the bottom of some boat trapped in the middle of the sea, no hope of ever returning to perfect the corpse and devour it.. and yet, still,

  


one by one..

  
  


__

"Hnn…Fuuma, wake up."  
"Stop, Kamui.."  
"Wake up, before I do, please?"

  
  


Everyone wakes up.

But the dreaming young man above him holding a shard of glass stood still, dark hair flat and expression grim, the glow of his face chilling and causing the fever inside of him to grow stale and old. He tilted that curious face full of nothing, the wind that spiraled upwards lifting those strands that could still float above and into heaven, where supposedly everyone was living happily and where there was nothing broken.

Death was beautiful as always, he thought with a sinister but ridiculous affection, his chest shivering against all his will as he said,

"We're drowning in it, Subaru."

  
  


_But the music had stopped for them both when.._

  
  


He looked, ill smile landing on the smaller man's precious music box, keeping him sleeping.

"Monou-san.. don't.." The quietness of his voice is vexing.

Keeping Subaru from waking up..

"Throw it."

No beat up radios, no classical music floating out of it, no bone-thin fingers part of pale and gentle hands.. and no shards of glass that reflected dimly the light that he'd seen somewhere in Subaru's smile, that wasn't actually there. Hell is static, and he watched out of the corner of his eye as the radio -- choked, wavering and full of lies, fell.. washing out with the ocean and shells and other broken things. Subaru wheezed, the gray of the world hiding his tears.

And he felt Nothing reach out from beyond the sea, and watched Fuuma's eyes sail into the end of flight with it, guileless and full of youthful rage. Rain used to be wishes, and when they tried to catch them in their mouths, there it was again, empty and warmed to keep them dead.

Just bitterness, and he couldn't hear that anymore. It kept ringing, church bells he heard until class had started when he passed them in the morning to school, on his old bike that he couldn't remember where it'd gone.

  
  


Days passed and the young man did not go out again. Fuuma brought meals to him; small things that they could always find around – trees were growing in Tokyo at the speed they had in the times of the gods, flowering and bearing fruit like an everlasting Eden. Fuuma smiled at the trees, thanking them for providing them both with enough to survive. Humanity had already taken so much from this place, this consciousness of kindness and gentle will, that the continued generosity of this planet made him forget the grimness of the world they lived in.

Subaru's company wasn't a burden. Most days they sat and observed the new sunrise together, silently taking in the smell of Spring and one day, he'd been wandering down a street filled with the blossoms and old strings of green that willows and plum trees had dropped. And he'd found some remnants of the past lying there, covered in this faithless blanket of leaves, quiet and undisturbed for the centuries that had seemed to pass since the last true human being walked the previous incarnation of his earth.

It wasn't very old, but it wasn't quite new, either. It couldn't have been, for what it was, and he found himself dizzy with some chilling desire when he saw what lie under the dying trees, which had also seen the fall of mankind and it's creations.

A car.

  
  


_"Someday, when I'm twenty.."  
"When you're twenty, Kamui?"  
"..yeah. Let's go someplace where they won't find us."_

  
  


They traveled, and when Subaru sometimes looked over at his companion, there a smile on that normally controlled face that came only from true fulfillment; not an imagined or false one. Whether it had been born from some childish indulgence to be free or simply power, Subaru saw this and felt the light outside saturate deeper into color, brushing fingers over the billowing edges of the other's t-shirt as a sign of contentment.

Fuuma looked over just as Subaru's pale countenance floated away from him, in the regal manner that came from airy surroundings and the clean breath of everything around them that sang, open and wracked with life. Subaru was radiant in his separateness from that; he was beautiful in the slick way his back curved over the downed window, smooth shoulders rolling into the sprawl, that expression of a wilting gray flower adding haziness to the view. Spread fingers wide open to the suction sound of the wind, and he saw the mouths of tiny children float past those unkind, thin fingertips, Subaru's cloudy eyes watching them as the spirits who'd died in that sea below them on the highway drifted back into unconsciousness when they left, encouragement by the sight of them gone and away.

They'd trespassed in that sea, he remembered, drowning themselves that day and letting death feel his body clean, Subaru's eyes watching him through the light in the clover colored glass, the murky cloud cover obscuring his vision and letting all the tree's branches burn like scratches on the retina. It'd been days ago.

"We're drowning, Monou-san? That's such a philosophical thing to say." He says unsmiling, struggling to be heard through the wind, white fingers flying through air as if slicing silk or skin. "It's a sad thing.. that we've already drowned in a sense."

His eyes followed the curve of some tightly wound pin in the narrow back, Subaru's empty voice holding the quality of all the butterflies opera's in the world; spoiled, trapped, and sweet. The green eyes have gone dark with that spilled ink, and he doesn't speak again.

  
  


He sits in the window contemplating those words, and the older man sits in the sunlight that escaped his shadow, staring at his broken violin. _He wants to play it,_ Fuuma thought. _Why not let him?_

Somewhere there is a place filled with dust, and invisible hands play the piano and through them come the most beautiful prose. Somewhere in this place full of dead memories of women, walls keeping them from entering the other side of that shallow storm – a thin sheet of rain that became death and unbreakable steel.

And the hands playing the piano are so fragile, but they manage to build a wall that keeps everyone on the other side; silk scratches it, and when he opens the window to stare down at Tokyo, all the guard rails have gone, all the people waiting to catch him have left.

And they don't catch him when he jumps, that wall of empty, liquid comfort robbing him of freedom as he's sucked under.

"Can you hear me now?" he says to Subaru, whose hands are empty.

The bells in the church are ringing, but he can't hear them because Kamui is sitting on the back of his bicycle, telling him of things that will never be, and never happened --- and he quiets into blissful awakening when he feels those thin arms wrap around his waist, and they ride someplace where no one can find them.

  
  


"Yes, I can hear you now."

  
  



	6. Dreaming

**Question Sleep?**  
_part six: dreaming_

  
  


He imagines himself sitting at the desk under the viel, white knuckled and his hands clutching the remains of music and green ink. Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake plays in the background, the dark, deep shadows of the room sneaking up on him like that way a man could; grinning white teeth all aglow.

They're playing something like tag in the night time, he and he his sister, and while she flies across the open field looking for his hiding place, where he could possibly be, he lies as if dead in the wet tall grass.

Still.

Breathing in the scent of moon and moist earth, imagining the feel of her ruined cotton dress and the cuts on her soft legs, sliced discreetly by that same fragrant cradle and the quartz gravel under it. Why is he hiding from her? Why is he curled like the child he is inside the earth?

"Subaru! Subaru, where are you? I give up!"

Her skin reflects off the surface of that humming evening, glittering scales of beatles passing the lamp of a firefly, ferocious and evil sparkle, like the dull maroon of blood spilled in the name of God.

Hokuto's voice cracks; her girlhood is melting away.

"Subaru.. please?"

  


  


_Oh how I love you, let me count the ways._

  


  


The scene is dazzling, shimmering in the far distance only a mirage of some sparkling, eternally new dream -- he always forgets, the green memories drowning in absinthe and the river Styx, and causing the leaves above him to spiral and mix with the foul black night time. Piano strings leave marks on his arms, but in him, they just pretend to write a symphony, one silent and one accompanied by the chorus.

_Seishirou-san.._

He lie in the evening, pale scene of liquids and succulent vines changing only when he started to forget to hold onto the string, the string connected to the last end of the world when the mirage dropped off into nothing, and he wished for it.. there he was. Coin-sized spider walking on glass before it starts to sink, and Subaru was there, eyelids sewn open with invisible thread.

"Watch this," the spider said, and he felt crystal shards push through his back, and Subaru quivered animally, agonized, _unable to move_.

"It keeps on going," the spider said, "though only for a little while."

"I see," he whispered, the tears blurring the scene from view, "I don't want to anymore."

"No, you don't... not yet."

The sky turned, and he fell away through the glass, sinking away to the bottom and curling into a spiral -- like the leaves had done -- around his middle, the thin trail of blood curling like smoke to the above.

He cried out, the sound being lost as he landed into a white room, his legs broken and his heart lying beside him. He looks down and sees the rest of the room through the hole in himself where that precious burden should be resting, and it's all in film negative, in shades of bloody brown and deep black like the quiet vulgarity of sleep.

  


  


Her legs are blurred, and her fingers, solid and calloused from hours of working at the sewing machine, curled around his. Someone tall and in black watched from above, but he can't bring himself to look up.

"A lilacs life is so short, it seems like only a week." she says. He remembers a week of reaching to get them, on the tips of his toes and with the sliding fabric of his gloves, unable to imagine what the petals must feel like.

"Or even a day." He remembers how after that day, they seemed to melt under the rain.

"In that time, it flowers and multiplies, and it grows larger, spreading the sweet smell it has from there, and outward."

"They seem so beautiful, from the inside of a car out in the rain. All blurry like paintings get when they're old."

Vines were growing in the fabric of her skirt.

"But.."

"Lilacs are surrounded by poison ivy. And when you reach to touch the blossoms, as pretty and inviting as they may be, the ivy which is so mixed up with them touches your skin and makes it itch until you bleed."

"Is that true, Hokuto-chan?"

"Yes, it's true." she says, smoothing down the oily leaves, which meander downward to her ankles. Subaru wonders if it's really true, but he dares not move to touch her, nor does he let go of her hand, which is still soft and perfumed.

"Why do people love them then?"

Her smile, so strange when combating the grim reality of her unfamiliar words, widened; and for the flash of moonlight that he saw it in, she was more like Monou Fuuma than his sister could ever be.

"Because they wish they could be like them."

Then, with frozen lips the color of ice and snow, pressed against that vicious countenance, he saw. That cruel smile against his sadness that was just as cold, but when together, melted. And he woke up.


End file.
